The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance

CHAPTER III. STAGE AND MAIL COACHES. Prior to the middle of the seventeenth century, about which period stage-coaches came into use in England, the only vehicles available to ordinary travellers would seem to have been the carrier's stage-waggon, which, owing to its lumbering build and the deplorable state of the roads, made only from ten to fifteen miles in a long summer's day. The interior of such waggons exhibited none of the refinements of modern means of travel, the only furnishing of the machine being a quantity of straw littered on the floor, on which the passengers could sit or lie during the weary hours of their journey. Though the stage-coaches came into vogue about the middle of the seventeenth century, as already stated, the heavy waggons seem also to have held a place till much later--for in one of these Roderick Random performed part of his journey to London in 1739; and it was doubtless only the meaner class of people who travelled in that way, as the description given by Smollett of his companions does not mirror, certainly, people of fashion. M. Sobriere, a Frenchman, on his way from Dover to London in the reign of Charles II., thus writes of his experience of the waggon: "That I might not take post, or be obliged to use the stage-coach, I went from Dover to London in a waggon. It was drawn by six horses, one before another, and driven by a waggoner, who walked by the side of it.